Anniversaries

by Uwe Johnson

  In 1964 the business of being homesick for New York while still in New York started. The sounds alone: they insisted that I admit it, I felt alive. Even though the big red fire engines were heading into danger, after all, rushing by as if already too late amid the throng of cars down below them idling in place; even though the firemen’s helmets and coats, black and striped with yellow, were still stained from the old days when misfortune had been unpreventable and fires were like the plague; even though the mighty wail of the siren, lurching back and forth every second, and the animalistic roar of the horn resounded with the old fear; even though the expert at the back of all that efficient technology steered the overlong vehicle out of its spot so casually that it seemed like he’d accept an accident with a sportsmanly shrug.

  In July 1964 a policeman, more than six feet tall and over 220 pounds, shot and killed a skinny black kid who, with some others, had been harassing a pink-skinned fellow American by throwing bottles and trashcan lids. The people of Harlem fought for four days and three nights, with cocktails à la Molotov, bricks, looting, and arson, against New York’s boys in blue with their riot gear, billy clubs, guns, and tear gas. For weeks afterward, a German woman carried her passport around the city with her to prove she was a foreigner.

  In 1965, in March, the American military started dropping incendiary bombs over Vietnam. Napalm.

  In a bank in New York City, a foreign-language secretary’s office was supplied with a removable plastic nameplate outside the door on the left, and it said: MRS. CRESSPAHL.

  On November 9 at 5:28 p.m., when the lights went out in the northeastern United States, the residents of New York City were concerned. One woman from abroad, who had tried to worm her way into a new homeland’s favor by studying its history, brought up August 1959, when electric power had gone out for thirteen hours in the area between the Hudson and East Rivers from 74th to 110th Street—this was part of the history of the Upper West Side, her neighborhood. She recalled June 1961: on the hottest day of the year the subways had stopped, elevators left hanging. Everyone has their own special story about the blackout of 1965: since Mrs. Cresspahl had managed to take the bank’s emergency staircase down to the street and make her way from midtown to Riverside Drive on foot but was still expected to contribute a story, she described the conductor of the Wolverine Express diesel train in Grand Central Terminal who’d talked her into buying a sleeper ticket to Detroit for the night. She nods when someone explains the blackout as a computer failure in a key position in the network controlling the Niagara power plant; she emits grunts of skeptical assent when someone persists in suspecting a military exercise preparing for the coming civil war. She doesn’t need to know everything; it’s enough for her to have realized that night that she was alive. She returned to the candlelit windows overlooking the park, to Marie’s silhouette, as to a home.

  It was getting harder to say goodbye, even if those goodbyes led to vacations in Denmark, in Italy. One evening in 1966, in the Copter Club on the roof of the skyscraper that Pan Am has planted on Grand Central’s shoulders, I was stunned by the quantity of haze through which a whirring-winged craft was to carry us to the airfield now called JFK. The lake in Central Park was a paler rag pickling in pallid brine. Two office slabs stood sentry, presumptuously clear and black and white, before the towerscape of buildings draped in fog. Park Avenue was visible up to Ninety-Sixth Street, you could see where the streetlights bordering the center strip stop, where the trains of the New Haven and Grand Central lines come up out of the tunnels. Trains would be safe on such a foggy day. The south brow of the Newsweek Building insistently proclaims in red: 77°; 7:27 p.m. By this time the helicopters were taking off every fifteen minutes, their flight numbers corresponding to the departure times. The rolling boil of the copter blades came out of nothing and after a while vanished back into nothing. Marie asked to look at our tickets, checking for the reservation back to the place we were about to leave.

  In 1966 a man named James Shuldiner, thirty-one, tax adviser, first tried to strike up a conversation with a lady from Germany—in a smoky little restaurant, at a red-and-white checked tablecloth, in a cramped little pocket behind the passage between the drink bar and the food counter. Everybody here lives on the verge of crime. And one crime leads to the next. Once: he lectured: a society fosters hostile energy instead of transforming it (police brutality, glorification of transgressions, violence against small nations), murders like the ones in Chicago every day are only to be expected. (The next murder of the year was about to take place in Austin.) – On the other hand, these killings are setting a record it’ll be hard to break! For a long time his Mrs. Cresspahl tried to keep secret from him that since 1961 she, too, had considered herself a student of New York City. Mr. Shuldiner felt she’d given him advice when he married a Jewish girl disgusted by the work nurses had to do in Switzerland. Now she’s cooped up with her unclean skin in a sparkling clean apartment on Broadway with a grand piano and a guitar. Marie, to be polite, accepted a graham cracker from the skinny and arrogant Mrs. Shuldiner, who then snidely asked her if she was starved at home. James looked abashed, felt shame, regret. He gave us sidelong glances meant to solicit shared responsibility; we pretended we didn’t see them.

  Everyone in New York has their taxi-driver story; Mrs. Cresspahl has two on tap. The first driver, after admitting to her his Jewish descent, which she’d already gleaned from the ID card showing his face and license number, then told her he’d contracted a form of impotence from sexual intercourse with a German girl. Can’t get erect, you understand what I’m saying, lady. Would you be willing to give me the only treatment on earth that might help?

  The second was taking her to St. Luke’s Hospital with Marie—a child who had something wrong with her knee, a 104° fever, terrible pain in the joint; in her distress she begged for help in German. As the mother carried her child up the hospital steps, trying in vain to cradle the hanging head in her elbow since the girl’s braids were so close to trailing on the dirty sidewalk, the driver shouted after her: I hope your kid dies, you German pig!

  In 1967, same as every year, a foreigner has to present her visa at the government office at the bottom of Broadway where they register resident aliens; every year the men there ask her what moves her to stay in NYC when she could also be living and making money in that wonderful country, Germany. They look incredulous, baffled, when the applicant informs them that if she had the choice between New York City, Düsseldorf, and Frankfurt, she would pick New York, but she wouldn’t know what to decide between Düsseldorf and København. The compliment she was trying to pay the officers’ homeland remained undetected. Since then she has taken to vaguely bringing up the exchange rate between “deutschmarks” and dollars; this gives her an air of prosperity and speeds up the process of renewing her permit. The expressions they’d have on their faces if she invoked a certain poet as her sworn witness, and sand-gray, the color of New York lions!

  In 1968 we decided not to follow the law according to which we’re supposed to take things slow and wait for events to take their course, await the gradual progress of history before dark-skinned people can live in friendship with pink-skinned neighbors: we plucked a girl named Francine out of a melee of stabbings, an ambulance, police. This little person with wide-set eyes sometimes appears in fuzzy morning dreams, tilting her head and weaving her stiff stubborn braids, and she says, both mocking and longing: “Yes ma’am, Yes ma’am”; when she leaves, she places a white kerchief fringed with lace over her dark gaze and dark head—the color of mourning. She may have died; she is lost.

  In 1968, at the start of our eighth year here, I heard two dark-skinned men talking about me at the Ninety-Seventh Street bus stop. I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop. When I eventually did start trying, and failing, to tell if it was English or Spanish they were speaking, I realized how far I was from the dream that I would ever understand this foreign language.

  In 1968 came what for now is the last message from D. E.
, who liked the way we lived. That agreement about a birthday apartment for Marie on upper Riverside Drive will stay unsigned. D. E. had word sent that he’s gone, an airplane has carried him off, to his death.

  The air-freight ticket agents give us some backtalk. Two big suitcases, another one like a wardrobe, for Prague—a Communist country, whaddaya think yer doing, lady? The lists, the permits? – We’re not diplomatic personnel, sir. The bill is going to a midtown bank. Do you see that green piece of printed paper under my hand? the hand I’d be happy to pick up if you want? So the shipment will be waiting for me at Ruzyně Airport tomorrow evening, yes? – Absolutely. Since it’s for a lady like yourself. Have a good trip!

  – You wouldn’t be giving up your apartment, Mrs. Cresspahl?

  – What crazy ideas you have, Mr. Robinson (Eagle-Eye).

  – It’s just, a boyfriend who takes his girlfriend . . . Someone saw you looking at apartments in Morningside Heights.

  – Just visiting someone, Mr. Robinson. You can hear from the telephone ringing that we’re planning to stay on Riverside Drive.

  – My apologies, Mrs. Cresspahl. And you can be sure: no one else is going to break into this apartment!

  – We’ll see you a little later this year.

  – Understood. Yes indeed, Mrs. Cresspahl.

  – This is the operator.

  – We haven’t placed a call.

  – You have recently called abroad several times, Berlin . . .

  – Helsinki once.

  – We’re afraid there’s a steep bill on its way.

  – It’ll get paid. That’s no reason to disconnect our line.

  – We were wondering if maybe it would be easier for you if you paid in installments, Mrs. Cresspahl?

  – With customer service like yours, we’ll definitely be staying with you.

  – Our pleasure, Mrs. Cresspahl.

  We arrive by subway under Times Square at the wrong time. Thick columns of people surge toward us out of the shuttles from Grand Central, diverted onto the three different staircases by the traffic police. – All the way down. All the way down. The authorities are acting paternalistic today. As soon as they see us, they clear the middle lane. – Make room for the lady! Make room for the child!

  In Grand Central Terminal the streams of people flow through one another, formed of such well-aligned and coordinated movements that everyone is out of everyone else’s way two steps in advance and gets where they’re going faster than if they’d been trying to hurry. Three escalators run down from the Pan American extension—motionless terraces of people detach themselves with a jolt as they make the transition onto the walking surface, as if on ice. Straight lines swerve deliberately off toward the next destination—left and right to the commuter trains, a soft left to Lexington Avenue and the Lexington Avenue subways, a soft right to Madison Avenue and the hotels, straight ahead to Forty-Second and the tiny information rotunda. People flow in from Lexington Avenue through the double doors on countless thousands of feet, swim off beneath the low four-leaved domes, are replenished from the exits of the Graybar Building, rush dense and uncrowded at us beneath the barrel vault with the starry sky in gold, seemingly incised there. Under this high canopy we go in the wrong direction.

  Waiting around the corner are the airport buses, elephantine bumblebees. The tinted windows pull a curtain of shadow before the city. The ride will pass between the cemeteries, to a terrain where bushes and lawns are trying to turn an industrial zone into a park. We will wait till the very end; wait for the loudspeaker announcement that calls us back to New York. Until they say that this is the last and final call for passengers to board the airplane. Passagererne bedes begive sig til udgang. Begeben Sie sich zum Ausgang. Please proceed to the gate now.

  August 20, 1968 Tuesday. Last and final.

  In a beach hotel on the Danish coast, across from Sweden. In a dining room for families: wicker furniture, linen tablecloths. In the garden, behind the bushes leading to the promenade. On the beach. From noon until four.

  An eleven-year-old child, her voice soft with exhaustion, weary. A lady, around thirty-five, coming downstairs behind Marie, in happy anticipation because she’d been called to reception. Anita had promised Prague; Anita is more than capable of already being here to welcome us in Klampenborg.

  The porter, the driver, the waitress; hotel staff.

  – Thank you for waking us up on time. De har vist mig en stor teneste.

  – Ingen årsag! There’s a gentleman wishing to see you as soon you’re ready.

  The gentleman is out on the patio—shrunken but standing straight by force of will, dressed in formal black and white, with snow-white hair—arms raised, he delights in the welcome. A raven, trying to hide how moved he is.

  – No! No! (This is what older people from Mecklenburg do.)

  – Herr Kliefoth. Marie, say hello to my instructor in English and proper manners.

  – I’m very pleased to meet you, Dr. Kliefoth. My mother has told me stories about you.

  – I think it would be a good idea to avoid German. This country was occupied by the Germans once.

  – D’accord, mine leewe Fru Cresspahl. I am here illegally as it is. Your friend Anita, she puts an eighty-two-year-old man on the train to Lübeck, sends an ID to Lübeck that will let him travel on to Copenhagen, and the Jerichow police never know a thing. But the name in the passport is Kliefoth, it’s my picture—I could keep it, just like this.

  Seen from the front Kliefoth’s head is narrow; in profile, forgotten depths are visible once again. At the table he rests his head in his hands, making his glasses slip up a little higher, their top rim over his eyebrows. Now the dark pupils are exactly in the center.

  – That you took all this trouble, Fru Cresspahl. A stopover in Copenhagen for the sake of a useless old man.

  – We have Anita to thank for that. She didn’t like the idea of our changing planes in Frankfurt. We do whatever Anita tells us to do.

  – She booked me a room here for ten days. If it’s all right with me!

  – Shes a good person, that Anita; we think so too.

  – Please. A lot of the time all that’s missing are the onions. The same goes for what used to be called tropical fruit. It’s only when one runs across an advertisement for a fish-smoking plant in a magazine from 1928, mentioning thousands of tons of smoked eel—you start to wonder. Theres no smoked eel in Jerichow or Gneez. No, the reason I’m looking forward to our meal is for company’s sake; it’ll give us a chance to talk.

  – Hvad ønsker herskabet?

  – Pickled herring. Mackerel in tomato sauce. Smoked eel with scrambled eggs—go ahead and laugh! And which wine . . . hvilken vin vil De anbefale os til det?

  – It’s six thirty in the morning for us, Herr Kliefoth. In our school we’re ranked by numbers. I’m number four in my class. What was my mother like in school?

  – It is due more than anything to my being the oldest of the survivors. I have to go to the cemetery when I want to talk to anyone.

  His eyes close with exhaustion. Reaching under the temples of his glasses he massages his own with the thumb and index finger of the same hand. The skin around his eyes is gray, heavily wrinkled, unmoving. Sitting there like a dead man—until he wakes himself up with those clambering fingers.

  – What was said at my father’s grave, Herr Kliefoth?

  – Hokum. So I threw a wrench in it. I wrote a P in front a it. Now what would have happened if you hadn’t liked the wine?

  – I would have sent it back. I learned that from a person who . . .

  – Now what makes you think of that, of all things! Jakob came to see me five times during the year after you left when he could no longer keep an eye on you. Came to read your letters, wanted to know what was going on at interpreters’ school. Your father was a dependable, caring man, my dear young Miss Cresspahl.

  – Herr Kliefoth, I’m only eleven. Please, call me Marie.

  – Your mother, Marie, was ab
out five foot four in May 1953. She wore her grayish black hair in a bob. Broad shoulders, narrow hips. When she was in Jerichow she liked to wear pants that would allow her bare legs to tan. Dark eyebrows, wary glances, thin lips—careful preparation for her adult face.

  – What’s it called in Jerichow when there’s no wind like this?

  – “Fine ladies’ sailing weather,” Fru Cresspahl. Present company excepted, of course.

  A voice of jagged hoarseness, booming bass when relaxed.

  – Herr Kliefoth, I dream about it sometimes. I’m on a Polish ship. It stops over in Liverpool then docks here in Copenhagen. Arrival in Rostock on the Old Channel, views through the Doberan Woods, Wismar or Gneez station. Or, if I’m not allowed Jerichow, Wendisch Burg. At worst Neustrelitz, Waren, Malchin, where no one knows us, where I can make enough money for an apartment with a view of a lake, a little dock for a boat, winter mornings on the ice, shadows of reeds, a fire in the stove . . . but Rohlfs is dead or never made it to major with his unconventional ways. We’re only allowed to travel through Mecklenburg in transit; if we stop at a hotel it’s under supervision; there’s no way to choose where we want to stay.